SEO vs PPC - What Service Is Best To Sell?

This question comes in from Jason and Jason says, Selling SVO versus PPC to small local businesses, which is a better business model, for example, say you have a client who pays or who has three to five thousand dollars a month budget. If you sell them SVO services, that's basically three to five thousand a month in revenue that goes directly to you.

Whereas if PPC, the lion's share, the budget would actually be going to Google and Facebook to buy ads, leaving only a small percentage of that monthly budget, let's say 15, 20 percent in fees and revenue for the business to take math. Okay, so this is a really good question. And when you frame it up that way, I think you're leading in the direction that I should say MCO is the perfect thing to go with. And that may be the case.

But let me talk a little bit about the difference being SVO and PPC and the type of companies that you'll end up working with. First of all, MCO attracts a certain type of company and that company is get something for free or inexpensively traffic because you either don't believe in your product or service enough that you would pay for advertising or they are not far enough along that paying for advertising would be something they have budgeted.

Or maybe they just can't fathom the idea of paying for Google or Facebook click fees and, you know, padding the pockets of these rich tech companies. And they want to earn it. Right. They want to earn it from these rich tech companies. So that's just one way to look at it is that, you know, MCO, PPC or SVO could simply just be that somebody isn't far enough along their business where they believe enough that they want to pay for something. And so in that case, yeah, you know, they they would probably want you to do SVO. And if they do go with you then and they have three to five thousand dollars to spend, then they can spend it with you and you'll be happy.

You'll make money and you would make more take home for that client than you would. But I just don't think it's an apples to apples comparison. First of all, there are very few companies that are going to pay three to five thousand dollars a month for SVO. That is between thirty six thousand sixty thousand dollars a year. And what companies and a pay for that if they don't have some kind of evidence, that's gonna make them millions of dollars as a result.

And so your SVOD service is really on the hook for making somebody millions of dollars or being a pretty high percentage of their overall spend that they have and their marketing to do MCO. And so a three to five thousand dollar contract is not the norm. It's actually something that very rarely would you land that. And you have to be pretty far along and have some really good marketing and know where to get to that point. And so that is, you know, versus paid media.

You know, we're talking companies that have a certain amount of money coming in revenue wise. And they usually look at that as a budget item. So they're willing to spend sixty thousand a month on their overall advertising or even more than that, because they know that's going to have a chance that it's gonna make them that million dollars we're talking about. And so it's actually a lot harder for somebody to spend 60 grand in SVO to make a million dollars. And it is through paid advertising. Otherwise paid advertising wouldn't exist if it were that easy to do it through Rossio, then everybody be doing it and there wouldn't be paid media. But of course, Google and Facebook have so much to lose by you, not advertising. They make it hard.

The algorithms are hard to earn and to get out, you know, to get yourself out there. And so, again, not apples to apples comparison. And so usually a company that's further along or that's that's mature, that has budgets for marketing, has a marketing department, they're actually gonna want to do the paid media because that ends up usually being a pretty big part of their overall strategy. And it's something they can count on. You can't really count on SVO. And so I don't know if it's something that I would say unequivocally you should keep the money as much as you can versus paying, you know, some of that retainer to Google or Facebook. I just think it's a different client entirely.

So I would say that a three to five thousand dollar a month SVO retainer for a company you work with is this is the equivalent if you wanted to have an apples to apples comparison, that's probably a company that's willing to spend 15 to 20 grand a month on paid advertising. And then when you look at that and you do the math of percentages, you'll end up being pretty much the same as there. So fifteen to twenty thousand fifteen to twenty five thousand is really what a PPC company is to a company that has been three to five grand on SVO. So not a fair comparison to say I'm losing money by going in PPC versus Tessio.

And in fact, I actually think it's a lot easier to justify and validate any kind of retainer from PPC because that's a company has a budget that is willing to spend money to make money versus their CEO is a company who wants it for free. They want as much as they can get for as little as they can get. And so you're always gonna be at this this conflict with them where they want more out of you to pay less. And that's the premise you're under. And so I've actually never been able to really solve the SVO model in my case, because I just went right to PPC and it was more lucrative and was easier to sell for that exact reason.

Now, the ones who are the most successful in ACOR are either bottom, the bottom, the barrel bottom feeders, spammers, you know, or they're the ones who go upmarket and they spend, you know, they charge 10, 15, 20 grand a month to do SVO because they're working with large e-commerce companies who can prove the value of all the linked building efforts of all the. The the activities they do in bottom line revenue or top line revenue, whatever, you know, both actually. And so not apples to apples. And in fact, you either want to go upmarket or downmarket with SVO. I think that three to 5000 mark is is actually pretty rare that you're gonna find companies in that sweet spot. So you're gonna want to do Marnay either.

And I think there are a lot more PPC companies that are in the sweet spot you're looking for, for PPC, at least from my experience. Hopefully that helps. Hopefully you can take what I'm saying and and either apply it to what you're doing or if you don't believe me, then just double down on what you're working with because you write three to five thousand and Nescio is better than three to five thousand or in paid search. If 80 percent of that money goes to the networks. And so bottom line is, if they only have that much budget and that's here who you're sourcing, you'll have make more money if you do the SVO than if you do the BBC. So hopefully that's the case for you in there and you're using your real numbers, then you're good to go. All right. Thank you.